TIFF 2014: How Josh and Benny Safdie helped turn a homeless woman into a leading lady with Heaven Knows What

Josh and Benny Safdie never meant to make a star of Arielle Holmes. Indeed, the New York-based filmmakers, whose new film Heaven Knows What makes it North American premiere in Toronto this Saturday, found their leading lady quite by chance, coming upon her while doing preliminary work on a movie based in the Diamond District in Manhattan. Josh had immersed himself into what he describes as “the deepest possible research” for the film, delving into the underclasses of 47th Street disguised as one of their own. “I dressed differently, I wore a lot of jewellery, I palled around with some pretty scummy people,” he explains by phone from Venice. “I even pawned Rolexes.” It was in character that he stumbled upon the girl who would soon dominate his life.

One evening last summer, as Josh was leaving the Diamond District for the day, he saw a girl waiting for a subway — “the most beautiful girl in the world,” as Josh couldn’t help but remark. She was considerably too young, he saw, for the lead role of the film he and Benny were working on, but he knew he needed to work with her in some capacity. He mustered the courage to approach her and asked if perhaps she’d like to act in a film. “I told her I didn’t know what role we’d have for her but I knew we wanted to find something for her to do,” Josh remembers. “She said she’d always kind of thought about acting.” A week later the two met for dinner to talk about the idea. “At the time,” he says, “I assumed she was a Diamond District assistant. But when I show up in my car and I see her on the side of the street, she’s dressed completely differently. She looked like a street kid.” He could see she was also undulating drowsily. “I thought, ‘Well, she’s either tired or she’s a drug addict.’ ” It proved the latter.

Five films that influenced Heaven Knows What

1. Christiane F. (Dir. Uli Edel) This German film about the drug scene in West Germany during the 1970s proved a seminal example of cinema dealing with addiction in a realistic way.

3. The Panic in Needle Park (Dir. Jerry Schatzberg) The controversial Al Pacino drama focused on a group of young heroin addicts in Sherman Square in New York City.

4. Possession (Dir. Andrzej Zulawski) This cult favourite horror film is best remembered for its tour de force performance by Isabelle Adjani, who the Safdies asked Arielle Holmes to study before shooting.

5. The Dark Knight (Dir. Christopher Nolan)

Josh Safdie discovered that Arielle Holmes is a huge fan of Heath Ledger’s performance of the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Batman film, and the two bonded over it quickly.

Later, at dinner, the mysterious Holmes made an announcement: “She says, ‘Look, I’ve got to admit something to you. I’m homeless.’ So that was something.” Holmes, at 19, was addicted to heroin and had no home or steady income. Still, Josh was hardly discouraged, and in fact he and Benny began to meet with Holmes regularly, even though, as they continued to scrape together funds for their foundering Diamond District project, they hadn’t yet found a role for her. Feeling charitable, Josh arranged for Holmes to appear in a friend’s music video, for which she’d be paid a much-needed $300 fee. But Holmes couldn’t be reached — her phone had been disconnected, she never responded to email, and for several weeks it seemed as if she’d simply disappeared. Then Josh received a call: It was Holmes, ringing him up from a payphone, asking with an air of desperation if they could meet. When Josh arrived he saw the bandages on her wrists. “I just got out of Bellevue”, she confessed. “I tried to kill myself.”

Josh and Benny scrapped the Diamond District movie. Instead, they commissioned Holmes to write about her life. “We wanted to see her perspective, her insight, what she romanticized and what she didn’t, what was horrific to her,” Josh explains. “We got the first 10 pages of her memoirs, and we knew we had it: We had our opera. So we started adapting.”

The result would be a feature about the volatile experiences of Arielle Holmes, who the Safdies finally had occasion to cast — as herself. Heaven Knows What follows a few days in the life of Holmes, a homeless young woman addicted to heroin who drifts through the streets of New York. It’s a film of breathtaking intensity and vigour, hurtling through the tumult of Holmes’s daily routine with the velocity of a blockbuster thriller. And at its centre is a performance of such force, such staggering bravery and candour, that one can only arrive at one conclusion: Arielle Holmes is a bona fide star.

The Safdies approached their subject, at first, almost as if it were a documentary of her life — an attempt of sorts at recreated non-fiction, aimed at absolute authenticity. “It started out as reality — documenting her life,” reflects Benny. But with time the began to push Holmes toward more conventional acting, encouraging her to depart from the exact details of her experience in order to better capture the emotional implications. Making an even partly fictionalized film, of course, is rather more taxing than simply shooting a documentary, and it was difficult for Holmes, who was still living the life of a down-and-out addict herself, to meet the demands of the production.

“Sometimes we had to do things 10 or 11 times, and I’d say to her, ‘We’re not going anywhere until this over,’ ” says Josh. “Sometimes she would grow tired; it was really long days and it was freezing outside sometimes. She would be solely on methadone some days because we couldn’t have her shooting up all day. The methadone takes all the colour out of your skin, so we had to use all of this makeup.” They nevertheless had faith, and Holmes ultimately persevered. “It was very difficult on her, but she’s very ambitious.”

Holmes’s accomplishments are quite apparent on the screen. But even more impressive, perhaps, is the effect Josh and Benny had on Holmes’s life beyond the frame. No longer is Holmes enduring the hardships of addiction or homelessness, and no longer is she banished to live forever on the precipice of death. “Now she’s been removed from that world,” Josh reports, with a touch of pride. “She’s taking meetings with managers in L.A. and she’s clean.” Last week, Holmes arrived in Italy alongside the Safdies for the film’s world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival. “The most surreal experience,” says Josh, “is seeing Arielle walking the red carpet. She was living on the street not that long ago, and now she’s in gowns walking around Venice, drinking spritzes.” She’s adjusted to the life of the glamour quickly, and Josh and Benny couldn’t be happier. “When she did her photocall and had hundreds of paparazzi calling for her, yelling ‘Arielle! Arielle!’ I started crying for her. It’s beautiful. She’s a star, man. The second I met her I knew she was a star.”

Heaven Knows what screens Sept. 6 at 7:15 at TIFF Bell Lightbox, Sept. 7 at 10 p.m. at Scotiabank Theatre and Sept. 13 at 7:45 at Scotiabank Theatre. For more information, tiff.net